infoShooting Magpies (2005)
Amber Films (Producer)
80min, digital video
Feature film
Available as a DVD
Fine performances and an unflinching gaze... New York Times
Special Mention, Britspotting Festival, Berlin 2006
Emma, a mother at fifteen, now in her early twenties, wants some kind of normality for herself and her two daughters. Local gold dealer Ray tries to steer an addict son back towards an interest in harness racing. Barry, single father and ex-youth worker, keeps an eye on the streets, fearful for his son Callum. "You used to come across the kids you worked with in the court round-ups," he observes. "You're getting them in the obituaries now." When, one last time, Emma tries to get her partner Darren off heroin, Barry is drawn into a chain of events that begins to threaten the relationship he has built with his son.
Whippets in union jacks turn out for a visit by the Queen, but the new wind turbines seem to mock the memory of the coalfield and the identity it gave. Beyond the edges of the mainstream economy, gold chains can be more useful than savings accounts and bad decisions have hard consequences. Heroin and the hopelessness it both feeds off of and inspires are just a part of an everyday landscape which has to be negotiated. And people keep going: trying to construct new lives; watching their children...
Set in post-industrial East Durham, in the North East of England, Shooting Magpies is a film about hope and survival.
Shot on digital video, Shooting Magpies is the third feature film in Amber’s coalfield trilogy. The Scar (1997) looked at the lives of women after the Miners’ Strike and the campaign against closures. Like Father (2001) explored men’s lives.
AMBER FILMS
Made with the financial support of Northern Rock Foundation, Northern Film & Media and Channel 4.
Cast includes: Emma Dowson, Barry Gough, Callum Gough Jackson, Jade Bell, Shannon Harker, Darren Bell, Rocky Langthorne, Sanchez Coulson, Brian Hogg, Spike Bostock, Diane McFarlane, Daniel Thompson, Andra Conn, Marilyn Johnson, Joe Armstrong, David Ord, Martin James, Kevin Buck and Wayne Buck.
Music: composed, performed and produced by Rick Taylor & Frank Gibbon; recorded at Wildtrax Studio, County Durham; guest musicians: John Miles Jnr & Chuck Fleming
SPECIAL DVD FEATURES
The Making of Shooting Magpies (62 min), a behind the scenes insight into the research, improvisations and relationships out of which Amber develops its work.
Barry’s Story (12 min), looking back on his childhood and his own relationship with his father and with ferrets.
Emma’s Story (6 min), an extract from We Did It Together (2003), a documentary made with teenage mothers in East Durham.
Spike’s Story (7 min), an interview exploring his childhood and subsequent trouble with the law.
Coalfield Stories (16 min), a slide-show presentation of the photographic project out of which the film grew, with work by Dean Chapman, John Davies, Martin Figura, Peter Fryer, Richard Grassick, Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen, Simon Norfolk, Sally-Ann Norman, Karen Robinson and Chris Steele-Perkins.
THE MAKING OF SHOOTING MAGPIES
In 1998, as Amber worked on Like Father, it initiated Coalfield Stories, which became a seven year programme of photographic production documenting changing lives and landscapes. Barry Gough was one of the subjects of Peter Fryer’s Fathers. Emma Dowson was a participant in a video and photography project developed with a group of teenage mothers.
Growing out of the photography, the emerging narrative of Shooting Magpies brought the two characters together, drawing in Barry’s son Callum and Emma’s young children Shannon and Jade. Brian Hogg (Ray) and Darren Bell (Darren) are both long-term Amber collaborators. Spike Bostock (Spike) and Sanchez Coulson (Deano) were both subjects of photographs in Chris Steele-Perkins’ work on Durham’s animal cultures. Sirkka-Liisa Konttinen first came across Rocky Langthorne (Rocky) as she photographed Durham’s cliffs and beaches for The Coal Coast. He was living in a cave at the time. Later on, Sally-Ann Norman photographed him as she documented the coalfield’s housing in Farewell Squalor. He claimed to be working as an informal ‘caretaker’ for the Easington terraced houses, the demolition of which she was recording. By the time Amber were filming in the street a couple of weeks later, he’d gone again. The semi-demolished house he’d been occupying was burnt out. Many local people (together with the Queen on a fleeting visit to the coalfield) appear as themselves in scenes where fiction and documentary is blurred. A further blurring came, contrary to the fictional narrative, with Emma and Darren’s decision to get married.
The decision to use digital video came out of a desire to get on with things in the absence of a budget. The group became interested in incorporating research material directly into a drama that would be structured and improvised around it, and working with the storytelling talents that had drawn it to Barry and Emma in the first place. DV allowed Shooting Magpies to be developed on the hoof, using available light. Cost pressures were taken off the experimental process and the production took on a life of its own, fitting around the cast’s daily lives and taking advantage of events happening around them. Finance difficulties extended the shoot over eighteen months, and there were plenty of events to consider. In many ways it was a return to Amber’s approach in the 70s and early 80s: a small crew, flexible enough to exploit the unpredictable, incorporating it in an evolving narrative that draws its energy from the texture of people’s real lives.
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Shooting Magpies (2005)
By: David Curtis - 20th September 2007 (at 11:32PM)A very, very important film touching a difficult subject. Considering that the main charterers in this film are not actors, it beggars belief, as their performances are nothing short of amazing! I am lost for words about this film because the only other drama that I can think of that even comes close for passion and raw unflinching, tell it like it is truthfulness is The boys from the black stuff. I cannot recommend the film highly enough. It is a....IN YOUR FACE BRITAIN TODAY. A wake up call to British cinema, that this is the way to do it! If the rest of your work is as good as this then you have no equal. Well done!